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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29365452">Reptiles of the Mind</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples'>CiderApples</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Good Omens (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, and a confrontation of dreadful truths, and a hand on a knee, and wistfulness and angst, honest hour in the bookshop, with cocoa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 04:55:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,179</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29365452</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiderApples/pseuds/CiderApples</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A deeply drunk Crowley stumbles to a bookshop, very late. He does not have an appointment.</p><p>“It’s not fair,” Aziraphale says finally, into the darkness. His voice is soft, crisp with sorrow.<br/>“What’s not,” Crowley murmurs, still in reluctant thrall to his own miracle.<br/>“What you are.”<br/>Crowley waits, but no more comes.<br/>“And what’s that,” he prompts, even quieter.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Aziraphale &amp; Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>137</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Reptiles of the Mind</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'm only toe-deep in this. Going to get a lot wrong. Hopefully I get enough right.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A.Z. Fell’s bookshop is open, but not for the selling of books.</p><p>Not that anyone's buying. At this hour, only drunks and skeleton crews pass by. Nevertheless, the door sign wards off any daring shoppers. <em>By private appointment only</em>, it reads.</p><p>Many have made private appointments with A.Z. Fell, Bookseller, over his decades of operation: some to ogle antiquities under the pretense of purchase (an anxious prospect); some to ogle antiquities under absolutely no pretense of purchase (much preferred); and some, though few, to see the bookseller himself, to pursue what they felt had been an overly-meaningful smile given earlier in the day while the browsing shelves. (These appointments almost always departed quickly, in a fug of confusion and disappointment.)</p><p>At present, there is a caller in the shop who has little interest in books, and who has made no appointment at all. He tends never to make them: favoring, instead, rousing bangs on doors in the middle of the night, or day, or whenever, or apparition when it suits him best.</p><p>Apparition hasn’t suited him lately. He’d been scared off it a bit after the catastrophe: that wild, desperate groping through fire for something that wasn’t there, something that’d just gone. He hadn’t liked that at all. Now, in rebellion, he’s been making it a point to be sullenly and insistently corporeal: slow, plodding, and eminently traceable. He leaves tracks behind him and tosses them ahead: the engine of his car, the slam of its door, the cold flames of his aura licking off his wings, up walls and through windows as he goes.</p><p>A.Z. Fell had seen the signs of him coming from a mile away. This is how he'd known, in advance, to unlock the shop door.</p><p>And make the cocoa.</p><hr/><p><br/>Crowley stumbles a bit over the threshold. Aziraphale holds his hands out low, like herding a muddy child inside from play.</p><p>Crowley comes in muttering, and keeps up a steady stream of complaints as he weaves bendily around the narrow, book-piled passages, far too treacherously for Aziraphale’s comfort.</p><p><em>Oh, now— really</em>, Aziraphale says, as he follows Crowley around, corralling the wings that flap out now and again without warning and threaten his careful stacks. Crowley’s had more wine than he'd had at the Ritz, perhaps more wine than Aziraphale has actually ever known him to consume, and he’s railing against everything and nothing: squeaky trolley wheels, the death of bees, modern car design, and the general injustices of his lot. (This last one, curiously, is the only subject upon which he does not expand. When he reaches it, in fact, he goes dejectedly mute. He stops, mid stride, in a row of Aziraphale’s ancient cookbooks, and loses his will to go on.)</p><p>He looks angry. Hopelessly upset. And he looks in this way at Aziraphale, as if this is his fault, or his responsibility to fix, or both.</p><p>Aziraphale remembers the cocoa.</p><p>“Oh, come on,” he says, taking the sulky demon by the shoulders and steering him toward a more appropriate place for collapse.</p><hr/><p><br/>The bookshop has a wonderful Victorian settee in the back, which even Crowley has agreed is far more comfortable than anything manufactured since, despite the piebald upholstery. When Aziraphale leads him there, Crowley folds himself habitually into the left corner in a sharp, cross arrangement of limbs. He sighs, corners of his mouth hanging in the way they do in a sort of semi-permanent aghast, and has to be thoroughly convinced to take his cup of cocoa.</p><p>Aziraphale settles into the opposing corner at just the right angle to give counsel — or at least a series of concerned, reproachful glances — but Crowley spares him no such opportunity, nor suggests such a need. He stares dead ahead, into a pile of dusty restorations, and sighs again, louder. Harsher.</p><p>“Sometimes,” he says, slowly, feeling out the words, “I start to think it all <em>means</em> something.”</p><p>“Well, of <em>course</em> it does,” Aziraphale says, too quickly, and when Crowley juts his chin up from his chest to face Aziraphale — his flinty black glasses flashing, the eyebrows behind them twisted serpentine, tumultuous — Aziraphale thinks he might have answered a very different question than he’d thought.</p><hr/><p><br/>Only a day ago they’d been in the Ritz.</p><p>Only a day ago, Crowley had sipped wine, been induced to eat, had smiled and a nightingale had sung, and now—</p><p>Now Crowley is of few words, and it’s catching.</p><p>Aziraphale’s own capacity for chatter has withered on the vine. He feels ineffectual without it. He has nothing to offer Crowley in the choking thrall of his black mood, and is reduced to watching Crowley silently, gradually spread himself over the settee like a great spindly spider stretching its legs, reaching out over a web toward a doomed fly.</p><p>Aziraphale doesn’t quite feel the fly. Perhaps more the web. He welcomes Crowley’s encroachment. The blades of Crowley's elbows and knuckles and knees are a fine reason to remain soft, himself. He’s often wondered how such an angular incorporation can be comfortable at all. How had he managed during the eras of stone seating? Hadn't the centuries been one long search for cushioning?</p><p>Crowley spreads further across the settee, deeper into a slouch, his arms slinging over the back and knees migrating sideways. All in silence, punctuated by fraught sighs that float off, unexplained.</p><p>Aziraphale deposits his mug on a side table and sits up a bit straighter. With determined caution, he puts a delicate hand on Crowley’s knee, which has, in its drift, finally reached Aziraphale’s side of the settee. He gives more than a pat, but not quite a caress. Crowley allows it, but raises an eyebrow, as he must.</p><p>“There, now,” Aziraphale says. He lets his thumb test a movement, a slight departure into the hollow of Crowley’s knee, then back again. It, too, is allowed...and this time, no eyebrow. Instead, Crowley tips his head back, overtired and overdrunk, and rests a thicket of coppery hair against the wooden filigree. “There, now,” Aziraphale says, softer. </p><p>Time slips past them.</p><p>Several moments arise where Crowley seems compelled to say something, lifting his head or opening his mouth, and then doesn’t. Several moments arise, too, when Aziraphale feels it might be nice to pick Crowley’s legs up off the floor and swing them over his knees, put a pillow under the demon’s head and induce him to a pleasant dream, but he doesn’t. All he dares to do is add several fingers to his gentle movement over Crowley’s knee, which Crowley shows no sign of noticing.</p><hr/><p><em>Crowley is asleep</em>, Aziraphale thinks.</p><p>There’s no way to prove it without moving, but Crowley’s glasses have slipped down his nose, and there's not even a sliver of gold visible behind them. Aziraphale miracles the lights off, leaving the shop in a quiet, amber murk, to which his own eyes slowly adjust. At first, he can see only Crowley’s profile in the window light. Then the folds of Crowley's suit, the sweep of his hair, and at last, the fine details: the feathered creases around his eyes; the tick of his corporeal pulse in his neck; the empty space in that tender spot by his ear where his little snake would be, on the other side.</p><p>And then,</p><p>curiously,</p><p>he sees something else:</p><p>a light in Crowley’s glasses, so pointed and slight that at first Aziraphale thinks it might be the shine of Crowley’s eyes opening, but it isn’t.</p><p>It’s something in the room with them.</p><p>Above them.</p><p><em>Oh</em>, Aziraphale breathes, looking up. <em>Oh, my.</em></p><p>There are stars on the ceiling.</p><p>They’re barely there, just a few of them set on a miniature orbit that rounds Aziraphale’s chandelier, silent and blue. They’re lovely.</p><p>Aziraphale watches with mild reverence, same as he might have for beautiful flowers or strawberry cake or little toesie-woesies. He smiles beatifically at the little celestial orrery crossing his own peeling paint and it suffuses him with warmth. But this pleasantness doesn’t last, for something races up to displace it, something tall and empty and sad.</p><p>Holiness, as a sensation, is difficult to describe. Here, now, as it drapes him, holiness feels deep and cool and dark. Ancient, but not like books. Shiny, but not like glass. There’s a susurrus that isn’t wind or ocean waves; a red that isn’t blood or strawberries; a cool, puncturing blue that belongs not to babies but to firmament. It calls to something inside him that answers with rapt attention.</p><p>His touch on Crowley’s knee stills…and so, too, do the stars.</p><p>Aziraphale’s mouth opens, trembles, and shuts. He looks closely, lonely, across the settee at Crowley’s silent body. <em>Oh,</em> he whispers, aloud but to himself: a soft, small revelation that begins with Alpha Centauri and passes through <em>he-who-made-the-lamb</em> and fixes itself in Crowley. In what Crowley <em>is</em>. Not underneath it all, or despite everything, but <em>what he is,</em> and has always been.</p><p>Crowley <em>hmmms</em> muzzily from across the settee. He doesn’t sit up, but sweeps a hand over his mouth, as if wiping away wine. Before Crowley can fully come to, Aziraphale reaches over and takes the glasses straight off his face. Crowley’s eyes slit nakedly open, without them.</p><p>“Wotzit,” he grumbles, and Aziraphale points him toward the ceiling, where his stars are weakening, fading.</p><p>“Look,” he says, squeezing Crowley’s knee with a casual tenderness that immediately forms Crowley’s forehead into a mess of lines. “Crowley, look what you’ve done.”</p><p>Reticently, Crowley looks.</p><p>“Huh,” he says.</p><p>And they both watch. Crowley sets his jaw and stares with slow-blinking, golden-glass eyes. Aziraphale’s attention flits intermittently between Crowley and the sky with a gaze Crowley can feel through his skin.</p><p>A small, silent, delicate feeling flips and flutters in the ether, trying to stay on its feet.</p><p>“It’s not fair,” Aziraphale says finally, into the darkness. His voice is soft, crisp with sorrow.</p><p>“What’s not,” Crowley murmurs, still in reluctant thrall to his own miracle.</p><p>“What you are.”</p><p>Crowley waits, but no more comes.</p><p>“And what’s that,” he prompts, even quieter.</p><p>
  <em>“Good.”</em>
</p><p>It leaves Aziraphale as an accusation, as if it’s the wrongest and rightest thing in the world, and it digs an even deeper hole of silence, a pause in which Crowley, exhausted, weighs whether to argue the point. He’s tired, and the stars are out, and he’s had a lot to drink. </p><p>“Let’s not get into that,” he says in the end, shaking his head against the filigree. He holds a hand out for his glasses but Aziraphale won’t give them, and so Crowley stares him down with the full, wide serpent’s eyes that Aziraphale remembers from the garden.</p><p>Dear god, they calm him.</p><p>“S’alright, you know,” Crowley says, perhaps to coax his glasses back, but he sounds wistful. The stars flicker and die, and Aziraphale watches them go in a surprising swell of desperation. </p><p>“It’s not,” Aziraphale says. “You don’t belong down there.”</p><p>“Ah, but I’m not down there,” Crowley counters. “I’m up here.”</p><p>Aziraphale looks at the floor, trying to compose a jumble of witching-hour thoughts into one silken thread as the box of rose-cream pastries he'd eaten for lunch goes molten inside him with anger and regret.</p><p>
  <em>Crowley, glaringly divine, forming himself anew in the mud. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Crowley, wandering cheekily into life. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>Crowley, sauntering down, and down, and down, still smug even as the door closed behind him.</em>
</p><p>They’d locked <em>angels</em> down there, for god’s sake; angels in that dank pit, in that wretched place, in that seething, filthy carpet of rot. They’d let Crowley in with stars still in his soul, and held him there until the loathing swallowed him— for what? What could possibly be ineffable enough?</p><p>“It’s— it’s the saddest thing, really,” he begins, clipped, and doesn’t get any further before Crowley cuts in. Like he knows.</p><p>“Oh, look, it’s not all that bad,” he growls. He turns his head against the settee and fixes it in Aziraphale’s direction with a lazy, small smile. “I’ve got a car. You’ve just got…” He waves his hand flippantly at the craggy shelves. “…books.”</p><p>Aziraphale smiles in spite of himself, and the world, and everything else.</p><p>“Besides, who are we to argue with ineffability?” Crowley says, dryly, as if that isn’t his singular occupation. Aziraphale’s expression turns lightly scandalized. He sinks into Crowley’s eyes again, and they’re— different, somehow. Or is it Aziraphale who is different? Perhaps he sees stars, still.</p><p>“Crowley,” he whispers. <em>Whispers</em>, all of a sudden.</p><p>“Yes?”</p><p>“I think— you may be an angel, yet.”</p><p>For many heartbeats, nothing moves.</p><p>Then Crowley rolls his head away and says, “It’s just wiles,” and Aziraphale recriminates, “Crowley,” from deep within a cup of sorrow and joy. He wants to reiterate the thing about how it isn’t fair, but he’s already nervous about twice-questioning ineffability.</p><p>But then.</p><p>Then, a hand—</p><p>a hand comes down on top of Aziraphale’s hand, the one on Crowley’s knee.</p><p>It stays there. It holds.</p><p>Aziraphale’s face lifts from all sides.</p><p>Crowley sighs.</p><p>And on the ceiling, a tiny pinhead of blue light rises and spins.</p><p> </p>
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